Geralt and Yennefer Share a Candlelit Bath — Print & Oil Painting

The crop is extreme and it is the making of the picture. This is a long horizontal band cut off just above the waterline, so what you are given is two heads, four shoulders and a shelf, and everything else has been left outside the frame. The proportion suits a narrow space above a door or along a corridor.

Behind them the artist has built a small domestic still life and lit the whole scene with it. A ledge runs across the back wall carrying three or four burning candles, a stack of folded cloths and a rolled towel; a rail on the right holds a hanging sheet; a second candle-stand glows at the far right edge. The light is low, yellow and coming from behind, so both figures are rimmed and neither is fully lit.

Everything then rests on two expressions. On the left, a scowl aimed straight ahead at nothing in particular: brow down, mouth flat, wet white curls stuck to the forehead, the medallion still on its cord. On the right, turned back over a shoulder, dark hair pinned loosely up, an eyebrow raised and the beginning of a smile. One of them is enjoying this considerably more than the other.

The handling is smooth and warm throughout, built from cream, rose and ivory with almost no hard edges anywhere, and her black hair is the only strong dark in the canvas. It is the quietest picture in the group and the only one in which nobody is holding a weapon.

One of the quieter pieces in our The Witcher collection. The violet-eyed close portrait is the same sorceress with the humour taken out and the temperature dropped by twenty degrees.